Book Club: Are We Special?

I wanted to thank Blair Hodges for calling attention to an article we ran earlier this year by Professor Robert P. George.  Blair has been a frequent critic of the magazine, and we appreciate his engagement and efforts in drawing attention to the work we’re doing. As one of the pre-eminent political philosophers working today, Professor George’s decision to publish with us was a major sign of legitimacy.  Hodge’s article was, in many ways, perceptive. He noticed that Professor George, and by extension, many of our editors here, is concerned that many people, especially religious people, struggle to justify their beliefs about family, marriage, and sexuality through anything other than appeals to religious authority. (We kindly disagree that these positions are anti-LGBT+ as Blair describes them.) And he’s right about that motivation. Church leaders have been very clear about the doctrine of the family for more than a generation, as we highlighted earlier this year. But where the cultural messaging on sexuality is so dominant, it’s easy for Latter-day Saints to feel overwhelmed and struggle to explain to others why they accept what prophet leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ teach what they do.   And Hodges is right that we hope to make a difference in this regard with our work. But otherwise, his article falls into the same traps of many before him that George and others have largely dealt with. Conflating “Hyper-Individualism” with “Expressive-Individualism” Hodges attempts to address George’s concern with individualism. But he makes a category error. Individualism, as Hodges uses it, seems to be a synonym for selfish. Individualism, as George uses it, means how we define the individual. These are two substantially different concepts. On this basis, Hodges raises concerns about hyper-individualism (hyper-selfish)—pointing out this issue is no more relevant to LGBT+ issues than to anyone else. That’s a fine argument to make, but it really has nothing to do with the point George makes. His point being, how we define the individual is of crucial importance to issues of sexuality. Because today the predominant cultural approach to defining the self is expressive individualism. Expressive individualism is a philosophy that holds that who we are is defined by what we feel we are at our psychological core. And that the greatest good is expressing that psychological core to the world, including through our behavior.  As described by Carl Trueman in his recent book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, this idea has its roots in the work of Romantic philosophers like Jean-Jaques Rousseau and like-minded poets, literary figures, and artists of the 18th and 19th centuries, but largely took off in the 1960s at the beginning of the sexual revolution. Expressive individualism has substantially become our culture’s default approach to defining identity. But many Christians push back on this idea as we choose to make our central identities based on a different foundation.  As articulated by President Nelson in a recent devotional for young adults, he explained that the three identities we should prioritize (and not allow to be obscured) are 1) Child of God 2) Child of the Covenant 3) Disciple of Christ As Latter-day Saints, then, we choose to make those our central identities and base our choices on that foundation.  Hodges also suspects that “queerness would be less ‘central’ to a person’s identity the less social pressure and regulation they’d face about it.”  But what does Hodges mean by less central? If identity powerfully influences the choices we make, then the less central an identity, the less influence it has over our choices. These choices include why, how, when, and with whom someone has sexual relations. Prioritizing disciple of Christ and child of the covenant as identities, as Russell M. Nelson suggests, would lead to different choices about sex than prioritizing sexuality as identity. Love and Disagreement One of Hodges’ main requests is that George “spent more time saying how a person can be loving towards someone while also condemning an important part of their identity.” In our view, this is a tired argument in an already wearisome conversation. Sexuality is not an inevitably central part of identity.  Our editorial team falls across the political spectrum. In each of our lives, we have people who love us despite having serious concerns with that political part of our identity.  Our editorial team are all Latter-day Saints. In each of our lives, we have people who love us despite harboring serious questions about the important religious part of our identity. We’ve also felt loved by people who thought it was a dangerous and outdated idea not to have sex until marriage, constituting an important part of all our sexual identities. But Hodges’ argument suggests it’s somehow impossible to love someone while having honest concerns about how they prioritize the sexual part of their identity.  But of course, it’s not. Not only is it possible, but Christian believers are under clear command to love those we disagree with.  It’s those who demand “you can’t love me unless you agree with my paradigm for identity” that are preaching an extreme and radically alternative  approach to tolerance in a pluralistic society, not those who say, “I love you, but I disagree.” That has been the durable default of pluralistic tolerance that has helped make our diverse nation possible. Race and Sexuality Blair also goes to the old tired well of comparing race and sexuality. This is a comparison that many civil rights activists have rejected.  Dr. Alveda King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece, and William Avon Keen, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Virginia, the organization Martin Luther King Jr. started, have rejected the connection between sexuality and race in civil rights.  In fact, George takes on Blair’s point at length in his article in Harvard’s Journal of Law and Public Policy: Revisionists today miss this central question—what is marriage? when they equate traditional marriage laws with laws banning interracial marriage. … But the analogy fails: antimiscegenation was about whom to